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today I am not writing because of a certain problem or thing I stumbled upon. The “news” I want to share is somewhat “old” (26 August 2013), too: VMware announced vSphere 5.5 and ESXi 5.5!

Why am I posting this? Besides some cool new features in Hardware Version 10 or on the VDP side and Hypervisor side, a mayor change that will affect how we use vCenter in our Company is: Full Mac OS X Client integration (including the plugin for vCenter WebClient).

The GUI said nothing about needed consolidation, no snapshots where created, either, and if you look into the VMs config you see that the hdd points to a vmdk, not to a 00001.vmdk snapshot file. So, everything seemed to be in order, right?

The solution therein: Old 000001.vmdk-files lying around unused, nowhere referenced or anything. Simply deleting them will help (but an additional move to another location is recommended just to be on the save side).

So it seems that when you install vSphere Data Protection and want to use a distinct user that is not Administrator or root, you need to give that user (in this installation it was called datarecovery from the old version) rights on vCenter Level on its own. Just putting that user into a Active Directory Group will not suffice, as registration to vCenter will then give an error as result.

That message said hello for every single VM after there was a major breakdown in a data center. The breakdown was seen as a welcome opportunity to upgrade everything from 4.1 to 5.1. And since everything was broken anyway (although the VMs continued to run, yeah VMware ;-)) no one bothered going the proper path but just evacuated some ESXi-Hosts, re-installed them with 5.1, created a new vCenter and tried to import the VMs.

What was happening?

The GUI gave no hint as to what was wrong. But in the ESXi host logfiles something gave away what was going on: “vShield filters cannot be found for ethernet0”. Now, that is a clue, indeed!

The old 4.1 was running with everything filtered through vShield, whereas it was decided to not use vShield in this setup for 5.1 anymore. But in every single vmx-file for every VM there had to be removed the following two lines in order for everything to work as it should:

I ran into this problem a few days ago when I tried to give a vm a little more storage. I could not, it was greyed out. After looking into it I found the problem: This virtual machine was running on a snapshot. So, go to the snapshot manager and find: nothing!

Tracking the problem back: A while ago the vm needed a snapshot in order to be safe for an update. So, create snapshot, install updates. All fine. After that, the snapshot was deleted, and in the snapshot manager you did not see any snapshots.

But somehow the vms config still pointed to the delta-file instead of the original. And the delta was still growing. All in all over a 100GB, because this has been going on for quite some time now.

With vSphere 5 / ESXi5 there is a quick solution. In the virtual machines tab look for “Needs consolidation”. It is says yes, right click the vm -> snapshots -> consolidate.

But here we have ESXi 4.1 and vSphere 4.1, so no “consolidate” nor “needs consolidation”. How to fix this?

It can be done in most cases quite easily, but I needed some encouragement from others that already performed this: Create a new snapshot, and right when it is done: Delete all.

This will consolidate even the not shown snapshots and leave you with an all functioning vm.

So, for me, that did the trick. But sometimes it is not so easy. Please consider reading these links first: